The Ageless Angler was borne out of retirement. At sixty-four, I felt jubilant. It’s finally here. I did it. I am upright. Now I had the time to fly fish without limits—which for me was more of a rebirth than a retirement. I retained functionality at retirement—that was true wealth. Bringing strength, stability, endurance and vitality to fly-fishing, my mind could relax. I had the physical competence, the freedom and comfort to focus on developing the higher skills of a good angler. Working a stream with stealth. Approaching fish from behind, delicately presenting flies while avoiding casting my shadow on the water. Like a chess player, you’re thinking several moves ahead. You plan and put yourself in the best position to present your fly out of sight. Wading with stealth, maybe you’ll see the fish before they see you. All day sometimes, I’d experiment, learning and playing at becoming the ultimate outdoorsman. To broaden the learning process and recruit buddies, I joined fly-fishing clubs.
I assumed my fly fisher peers had made the same investment—arriving at retirement physically prepared to play the long game.
My naïveté showed. I scheduled outings and trips with the same earnestness only to find master fly fishers well adorned with gear but lacking stamina, endurance, strength and resilience. For me, communing with the wild is fly fisher sustenance—deep repose and renewal. But I learned that the cost of admission—strength, endurance and resilience was rarely paid.
It was troubling to watch my peers being robbed of something they loved—sidelined by what I knew was preventable.
The Ageless Angler is Explicit….
Too few people recognize that physical training is a pathway to not just catching fish but the fulfillment fly-fishing offers. I wanted to share what was possible.
Fitness is often dismissed as boring toil or athletic vanity rather than functional preparation.
The message is clear. We are all aging. Tennis players train. Football players train. Every sport requires physical preparation. Simply playing the game is not enough to maintain or increase performance. The same is true for fly fishing. If you want to perform well for the long term, training is nonnegotiable. Speed, strength, endurance, and durability decline with age.
My purpose with this book is to empower readers to take personal responsibility for their performance longevity, using the rigors of backcountry fly-fishing as both a motivation and a reward for maintaining a vigorous, high-performance body well into later life.
These core principles are woven throughout the Ageless Angler book and the Art of Aging website—they are a framework of what is possible.
- Aging is inevitable. Decline is not.
- Align lifestyle with biology
- Build a reserve
- Remain capable and independent
- Stay in the game
- Performance longevity
The entire ageless initiative is built on one simple biological truth—how you live sends daily instructions to your body that either accelerate or slow the aging process. Get a free copy of the eBook here.
